So as some of you know (and if you don’t, then why don’t you!) I’ve embarked upon the journey of creating a company, which in turn is creating a world.  And hopefully, you can see in the first five seconds of looking at Windstorm Studios’ site, that the world we’re creating is not going to be in your typical high fantasy setting.  And we’re in good company.  Right now there are more MMO’s coming out in a non-typical fantasy setting than ever before.   With games like Jumpgate Evolution, Champions Online, The Agency, and overly wordy Star Wars: The Old Republic looming on the horizon, players will soon have more selections than ever when deciding on the type of world they want to visit.  But why has it taken this long?  And why do we still see games being released every year set in that traditional fantasy setting?  Well, it’s mostly because fantasy gives you so much for free, from a design standpoint, and doesn’t present nearly as much of a challenge as designing your game in a contemporary or futuristic setting does.

Now for the purposes of discussion, I’m talking about the design for your traditional, player vs. envirionment heroic MMO RPG (notice the emphasis).  I love that our genre has grown so much that I should feel the need to qualify my discussion, but the rules are quite a bit different when designing sandbox games like Darkfall, Eve, and APB.  When the point of your game is solely “here are some players, here are some weapons, now go and kill each other until you get sick of it”, you’re less worried about the reasons the player might be in the world, and mostly just worried about making sure your game is balanced and everyone has a roughly equivalent chance of giving each other a good drubbing.

But if you’re building a quest oriented, strong single player experience combined with group and community dynamics in a shared world, well you spend a little more time thinking about the reasons the player is in the world,  the role they are playing, the kind of world they are playing in, and the types of things they can expect to do in your world.  And when you start to think about those things, you suddenly realize how much easier it is to answer those questions in a satisfying way in a fantasy environment than it is in a contemporary one.    For instance, let’s start by looking at the setting.

World in Peril

Take a look around you right now.  The desk.. the computer, the office you’re in.  Think about how you got to work, or school, or what you did today.  Now if someone were to give you a quest, right now,  what would it be?  Well it probably wouldn’t be to kill wolves, right?  Chances are you’ve never seen a wolf in your life.  There are no immediate dangers around that people need protection from!  By far and large, a contemporary society is one in which most of the needs of the people around you — especially regarding person safety and security, are being met!  So you might put your player in the role of one of those people that ensure that security — policemen, for instance.  Okay, that’s better.  Now you might have a quest to stop a local gang, or investigate a drug bust.  But if you want to give your player enough do to, then you have to fabricate a world in which crime is rampant.  Where packs of gang members roam down every street, and society is on the edge of collapse without your constant and heroic interference.  Have you taken a walk through Steel Canyon in City of Heroes?  This is exactly that world.  It’s not our world, and it’s not realistic, but it’s a world that’s more interesting to play in because it’s a world in peril.  A world set in a feudal fantasy setting is already in peril.  The basic needs of the people are no where close to being met.  Real perils lurk just outside the relative safety of the city walls in the form of giant bees, wolves, and lurking poisonous spiders.  A fantasy setting gives you so much for basically free when it comes to giving the players a reason to exist, and perils to face, that you have to fabricate, and provide justification for, in you’re in a contemporary or science fiction setting.  This is why a comic book setting works so well.  Because as soon as you accept the premise that you’re living in a comic book world - aliens crashing to earth, mutated killer robots, and giant plant monsters with flaming pumpkin heads can be accepted as a matter of course.   If you want to give your players a reason to be heroes, you need a world in peril.  By the nature of its definition, a feudal dark-age society is already in peril.  A comptemporary, all your needs are met society with instant communication techniques is not.  So that’s design work you have to do.

Melee is More Fun
One of the very first things you come to realize when you set down to think about combat in your contemporary or far future society is that the act of pulling out a pistol and shooting someone with it is not all that very exciting.  Filmmaker’s have known this for years.  Have you ever wondered why there is so much sword fighting in Star Wars?  I mean seriously!  It’s because George Lucas realized that while shooting each other with guns is all well and good, almost nothing beats the exotic excitment of a well choreagraphed sword fight!  Why in the hell do you reach a point in just about every modern martial arts movie where everyone throws down their perfectly good uzi’s and semi-automatic weapons, pull out katana swords, and go at each other!  I mean did the Crazy-88’s really run out of bullets?  No, but the simple truth is that sword fighting is just that much fricken more cool.  And the same is certainly true for combat in games.  The possibilities for animations are practically endless — quick thrusts, two handed overhands, stabs, parrys, shield bashing, the knockdowns, the list goes on and on. 

Now give them each pistols.  Well.. you can.. shoot each other.  You can.. OH you can fall to the ground and shoot each other.  For no good reason dive to the left, roll a few times, and then come up and shoot each other!   The point is, you really want melee combat in your mmo.  And you are going to have it.  In a fantasy setting, it’s easily accepted that the default way of fighting each other is in melee.  And the ranged combat is the exception - not including spells, which I’ll come to in a moment.   But in a contemporary or science fiction setting, the default combat is ranged.  And it’s not even “load this crossbow, set it, and fire it” ranged combat.  It’s “point and shoot”.  So now you have two major design obstacles.  One, you have to figure out how you’ll make ranged combat interesting — and two, you’ll have to decide on the justification for melee combat in a contemporary society.  Because no matter how cool you make ranged combat, you want swordfights in your game.

Magic Makes for Adventure

Lets get back to Star Wars.  So even though it’s futuristic society capable of traversing entire galaxies in a matter of minutes, we still have sword fights.  Awesome.  Shouldn’t that be enough?  Well no.  Because the other thing that you find you really want to have is magic.  And this is for a variety of reasons.  From a story standpoint, magic evokes images of the exotic.  Of fantastic capabilities that we as humans can only dream about because we’ve never actually experienced them.  It’s just like super heroes in a comic book game.  Fight’s with guns are mundane.  Fight’s with swords are exciting, but it is still a real occurance, something we know exists, and is thus still mundane.  But fights between wizards wielding arcane energies, commanding the forces of nature, and summoning demons to do their biddings is the stuff  legend and adventure, and is something we can never experience, or even hope to experience, in our lifetimes.  Again, Lucas realized this and put it in his story.  You have to have magic.  And look at your favorite science fiction stories — or even more so, games.  You’ll find surprisingly few of them don’t have some sort of magic weaved into the story in some way.  Mass Effect certainly has magic.  Tabula Rasa did.  Even Star Trek had its holodecks, and characters like Q that could do anything.    Additionally, spell effects make for great special effects.  Again, getting back to doing fun things in the game — it is far more interesting and entertaining, and the opporutunities for creating gorgious effects are far greater for a fireball spell than they are for a laser blast.   Now that doesn’t mean shooting people with blasters can’t be fun, heaven knows it is.  But it’s more interesting to watch, and to participate in, summoning a cloud of insects and dark aura that swirl about the world and descend upon the hapless player and devour him in a cloud of gore than it is to see him take a few laser shots and crumple to the ground.

Now, as magic is entirely the stuff of fiction (or as most of us would believe), it may seem ridiculous on the face of it to say that magic is more believable in a fantasy setting than not.  But while most of us don’t believe for a second that magic ever actually existed, our society is so pervaded with stories set in a fantasy setting in which magic plays a crucial role, that the fact of the matter is we actually do buy magic in a fantasy setting more easily than a contemporary one.   And you have the added advantage of not having to deal with the juxtaposition of magic versus setting.  That is, in a fantasy setting, it’s all fiction.  The setting, the society, the world, the creatures — it’s all fiction, so it’s easier to buy the fiction of magic right along with it.  In a contemporary setting, well you’re expected to believe that some part of it is “real”, or at least you recognize it as real so you have preconcieved notions about how things work.  You see cars and trucks and buildings and people walking around, you’re going to believe it’s supposed to be realistic.  You suddenly see those same people summoning lightning in that setting, and you’ll going to need a stronger justification for why someone in our real society can summon lightning.

So in the end, you have yet another design hurdle to get past.  In a fantasy setting, people just have magic and that’s that and you’ll be just fine if you never give a single word of explanation, because we all just believe it.  But in your contemporary setting, you have to either decide to not have magic, or you have to decide where the magic comes from.  If you decide not to have magic, well then you have to decide where is the depth, and variety, and complexity of your abilities going to come from.  If you want to have say nine different player classes, or roles, and they can all essentially shoot weapons, but you don’t have magic, well then where does the variety come from?  And if you are going to have magic, then you have to decide what’s the justification.  You can take the easy way out, and say it’s nanobots, or gawd-forbid, midichlorians, or you may just decide not to explain it at all, which is in its own way okay too.  But again, these are signficant design decisions you will have to address early, that again make for building that sci-fi MMO quite the challenge you probably didn’t expect.

This has run on twice my usual length, so if you made it to the end I’m greatly appreciative.  And if you have comments or thoughts you’d like to add to the topic,  I’ll be your number one fan for life.